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So I downloaded and installed Windows 8. I'm very impressed, except for one thing. I don't have touch, and I have this running in a virtual machine. How do I exit one of these full screen Modern UI apps using just a mouse and a keyboard? Right now my only method to exit one of these guys is to send Ctrl+Alt+Del to the machine. I'm sure that's not the right way... anyone figured this out?

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@Nick Josevski: Is that true? – JavaAndCSharp Mar 3 '12 at 0:46
@JavaAndCSharp just a joke ;) – Nick Josevski Mar 8 '12 at 1:54
Metro apps and suspending: They happily eat hundreds of private memory with that magic "suspend". It's like iOS. You are not supposed to close anything, but you will damn sure run out of memory in no time like that. – Shiki Jul 12 '12 at 11:07
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@Shiki they close themselves if there is memory pressure – Lavinski Nov 7 '12 at 7:22

8 Answers

up vote 77 down vote accepted
  • Use the keyboard. Alt + F4 still works like a charm
  • Use the top edge:
    1. Move your mouse or finger to the top of the screen {except for the top left extreme and top right extreme}
    2. Click/tap and drag to bottom of screen. The app will close when you get to the bottom.
  • Use the left edge: Bring the cursor in the very top (or bottom) left corner of the screen then move the mouse against the border up (or down). Now you can:
    • Middle click any app to close it.
    • Right click any app to show the contextual menu, with Close being an option.
    • Drag any app left onto the current app, then without releasing bring it to the bottom to close it

Please note that in Windows 8, in some cases apps are not supposed to be closed. This is part of the general Modern UI experience; however, because of popular demand, Microsoft did add this feature in the consumer preview.

See Microsoft's official video on mouse usage in Windows 8 here. Also a good video to watch is the touch video.

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Drag the mouse from the top to the bottom of the screen? That's pretty awful! – UpTheCreek Jun 13 '12 at 13:56
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@UpTheCreek: Why? – JavaAndCSharp Jun 13 '12 at 19:34
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@JavaAndCSharp Why? Becuase its not at all natural to drag the mouse pointer from one side of the screen to another! Is that supposed to be convenient? – UpTheCreek Jun 13 '12 at 20:13
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...erm, no. If you consider moving a mouse from one side of a screen to another to be an inconvenience, I'm not sure how you view using the computer. Plus, there's alt+f4. – JavaAndCSharp Jun 14 '12 at 22:22
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...erm, dragging a mouse all around the screen to do Basic functions is an incredibly inefficient and a waste of time. I understand a touchscreen might be better, but not using a mouse. – Moab Aug 29 '12 at 14:13
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up vote 46 down vote

Press the Windows Key, it's like a 'home' button.

It looks like it's you're not supposed to 'close' apps in a traditional sense, and should be in a 'suspended' mode instead this is achieved by just going and doing something else like going back to the home screen...

keyboard - windows key

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This. Treat it more like a smartphone - when was the last time you manually exited an app in Android or iOS? You don't, you just hit the home screen and it suspends the app. (You can even see Win8 doing this - in Task Manager, non-active Metro apps show as 'Suspended'.) – Shinrai Sep 14 '11 at 16:03
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It's driving me nuts when they show up in the alt-tab though.. Are they really ready to make alt-tab useless when running lots of metro apps? – Richard Sep 14 '11 at 17:13
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@Richard - It does drive me nuts too, but this is their design philosophy. :/ – Shinrai Sep 14 '11 at 19:00
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There are very good reasons to want an application closed (process no longer running), dodging the question is not an answer. – Ben Voigt Jun 30 '12 at 23:43
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@BenVoigt - At the time this was written, there was no way to close them - this was not dodging the question so much as it was the only reasonable answer. That functionality was not added until later builds. – Shinrai Aug 27 '12 at 19:42
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up vote 8 down vote

Nick Josevski gave the answer if you just want to go back to the Start screen, but, if you want to actually close it then the Ctrl + Alt + Del method works as you said. The best approach I've seen however is the good old Alt + F4 combination, which still seems to close applications.

I would have thought there is a better way, but I haven't found it yet.

(Little notice - When I first fired up Windows 8, I had problems closing applications and did try Alt + F4 to get out the plane application with no luck. However, it appears to be working now. I am not sure what was going on earlier and can only guess it was gremlins in the preview!)

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@LoneCoder's answer suggests Alt-F4 will be removed in the final release, so don't get too used to it. – Daniel Beck♦ Sep 17 '11 at 12:21
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@Daniel Beck alt-f4 works in RTM. – Tony_Henrich Aug 27 '12 at 0:38
up vote 8 down vote

Here is an answer from someone at MS on this forum thread:

The idea is Modern UI Style apps are not closed. The system takes care of keeping the apps from consuming background resources automatically. You can examine the app lifetime information in the developer documentation if you'd like. [...] Alt+F4 only works in the dev tools integrated builds as a developer feature and is not a general mechanism.

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up vote 8 down vote

The short answer is that you're supposed to leave Modern UI applications as suspended. If you need to free up memory or manage to write something that kills the system, you can kill Modern UI apps using the task manager. I'd assume that they're going to tidy up the behaviour of alt-tab at some point, but for now it's not that nice.

If you're accessing over "mstsc" RDP(Remote Desktop Protocol) and want to go to the start screen but can't hit the start button on your keyboard directly, then Alt+Home might help you out.

Similarly, if you want to kill the application/process use Ctrl+Alt+Delete, then Ctrl+Alt+End should send that combination through.

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up vote 7 down vote

If you are running Windows 8 in a virtual machine and the host intercepts the Windows key, try carefully moving your mouse to the bottom-left corner of the Windows 8 screen. The Start button should appear.

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up vote 7 down vote

Starting with Windows 8 Consumer Preivew, you can close Modern UI applications by click and dragging from the top of the application all the way down to the bottom of the screen. The touch gesture works the same way.

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up vote 4 down vote

I just found a more elegant solution than three-fingered salute... Win+R, then click on the Start icon (Windows icon, bottom left). But I'm ready to use the actual method.

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Win +r did not bring up the Start Icon for me. (Hovering the mouse works irrespective of Win +r) – Guy Thomas Mar 27 '12 at 12:32
This was in the developer preview. I think some changes have been made for the consumer preview. – Nathan DeWitt Mar 27 '12 at 12:51
For me, Win-r asks to run command line. So when I could not exit out of PDF viewer, it flipped over the view back to where I was on the desktop and opened command.exe. So all I had to do was abort that, which was easier than having to go to start and abort some other thing I touched with fat fingers. thank you! – AnneTheAgile Mar 31 at 20:05

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